I just got Spectralayers Pro 12. Within cubase 13, I wanted to separate just the drums from a recording. I chose unmix instrument, then a section of the recording where the drums are soloing. And chose register instrument, while playing that part, it says select sound first. If I have the track selected and playing and it’s not selected, how is it?
When using Unmix Instrument you must make a sound selection in the spectrogram window; preferable by using a selection tool (”dotted line” icon in the tools section to the left), not by selecting a layer. Then register this sound in the Unmix Instrument dialog window. Then deselect that previous sound selection in the spectrogram window. Then run ”apply”. Be sure that you operate on a layer you want to apply the process to.
BUT, if you want to separate drums from a mix you should use Unmix Song instead of Unmix Instrument. It is way better!
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Thanks for clarifying. It did create a layer with drums only, though it seems a little lacking in some of the frequencies, more bassy. When I soloed the non drums, there is a bass solo where it seems more of the higher frequency drums are also -snare, cymbal.
I’ll save and try the other method you suggested. I just didn’t need all the other layers separated, as it is the drums I wanted to listen to more clearly,
I reopened the song to try unmix song and it shows bass and drums checked. should I check more things here?
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If you’re only after the drums, then tick only ”Drums” in that window. Everything else ends up in the ”Other” layer.
I recommend you use the ”High” quality option instead of ”Balanced” for the best result.
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That did a better job, thanks.
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Now I went through the manual seeking more info about using this in Cubase as an extension, hoping to see how to extract the layer to be a track in cubase and didn’t find.
It did say that there was no file menu because it is sychronized then with cubase, but then I wonder why the original track in cubase and the spectralayer below are not in sync, but will play different parts of the same track. I missed how to get the desired layer as a track in Cubase, below the original.
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Never mind, found video of how to.
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Using ARA mode in Cubase 13, I separated out stems of an old recording of mine, had to do a lot of cutting and pasting to get more of the parts on the desired layer and piano and guitar still had a lot of overlap. But I dragged and made layers into tracks and played some and then decided I would try going further and separate the drum layer into its parts. I did unmute drums, and it added those layers to the previously separated layers, all distinct. but when I mute the Cubase tracks, I hear nothing at all in the Spectralayer ARA area whether I solo something or play all the layers. What’s going on? Here just drums to play.
So the original track in Cubase can’t be soloed while this is happening? but they are out of sync, playing back
The drum track is muted on the picture.
If you mute the drum track in Cubase you can’t hear it in any editor, ARA editors like SpectraLayers included. I think it goes without saying.
If you solo the track in Cubase you should be able to hear it in any editor, SpectraLayers/ARA included.
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In the picture, there is the original gray track which has all the sounds and was unmixed, ARA and those are the unmixed layers in the window below. The colored tracks below the original gray track are muted. These tracks were unmixed layers and created by dragging from the unmixed layers window. So they are independent layers now, aren’t they? May confusion arises in that the original track is soloed, and so are the drums in the lower right window that were derived (unmixed) from that track, so expected to here just the drums play. But hear nothing.
They are not independent until you have “made extension permanent” (right click > contextual menu > extensions) for each one of the SL derived parts, and/or doing the same on the original “parent” part (for which you could instead try “remove extension from selected events” with a similar right click).
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Thanks for clarifying.